Fred Findhorn has just landed on an unstable Arctic iceberg to dig through the wreckage of a 1944 Russian military aircraft. His mission: to recover the frozen body of brilliant atomic scientist Lev Petrosian and a briefcase, containing top-secret documents about the clandestine meeting to which he was headed before the crash ... But, as Findhorn is about to discover, there are other scientists, government officials, and rogue operatives who will do anything to learn Petrosian's secrets -and are willing to kill to keep them buried.

Bill Napier was born in Scotland in 1940. He studied astronomy at Glasgow University, and has spent most of his career as an astronomer at observatories in Scotland, Italy, and Northern Ireland. He is an honorary professor in the Centre for Astrobiology at Cardiff University. In his research he has discovered a process which allows life to spread around the Galaxy, taking hold wherever it finds suitable environments-such as the Earth. He now lives in Ireland with his wife Nancy and divides his time between writing novels and carrying out research with colleagues in Wales and California. He likes to cook but faces stiff competition from wife and children.